Totally Optional Prompt: Revisitation

Sorry this is late, TOPers, I'm still in transit. By Wednesday I should be back home and on track.

For this week's prompt, revisit a place, person, or idea that was once familiar and that you haven't seen in a long time. Has it changed, or have you?

Request for Poems: Free Prompt

Bring 'em on, TOPers!

Prompt: Free Prompt

I'm on the road this week and don't have time to put a prompt together. So, for this week at TOP: share whatever you'd like. The only part that isn't

Totally Optional

is: share something!

Request for Poems: Blank Verse

Woops! didn't get around to putting this up last night!

Bring on the blank verse, TOPers!

Totally Optional Prompt: Blank Verse

This week, let's write a poem in blank verse. That means it doesn't have to rhyme, but it does have have meter.

You can use the old workhorse, iambic pentameter. Or branch out, and pick a less usual meter from this list. Or do something else entirely: after all, it's

Totally Optional

!

If you do decide to write a poem in meter, remember that meter is not just about the number of syllables. Iambic pentameter doesn't always have ten syllables, it can have nine or eleven. What's important is that five and only five syllables are stressed, and they alternate with unstressed syllables.

These examples are all from Shakespeare:

Standard IP: “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” (Sonnet XVIII)
Headless IP: “If the true concord of well-tuned sounds” (Sonnet VIII) (9 syllables)
IP with a feminine ending: “Farewell! Thou art too dear for my possessing” (Sonnet LXXXVII) (11 syllables)

If you're in doubt about the meter of a line, read it aloud. This can't be said often enough: READ IT ALOUD.

Play around with iambic tetrameter (same alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, but only four stresses to a line), or dactylic (Hickory Dickory).

Come back Wednesday evening and leave your permalink with Mr. Linky or in the comments section. Please note that if you leave your link on this post instead of the Wednesday post, people may not know to look for it.

Request for Poems: Conversation

What did we have to say for ourselves-- or to each other-- this week, TOPers?

Totally Optional Prompt: Conversations

Write a poem in the form of a conversation among at least two speakers. They can be people real or imagined, animals, plants, inanimate objects, or anything else you can think of. You could use direct or reported speech.

Or you could write something else entirely. Since the prompt is
Totally Optional
.

Wednesday evening, I'll put up the Request for Poems and you can leave your pemralink in the Linky or in the comments.

Request for Poems: Time to Leave

TOPers, please join me in a big thank-you to my co-host and co-founder, Mike. He'll be missed.

Anyone interested in coming aboard as co-host, let me know. You don't have to make a permanent commitment, but I'd like you to be prepared to host for at least a month.

On to this week's links...